Resurrection
I would only believe in a God who could dance
A couple things hit me this week, in no particular order:
Ariana saying to me: “We really are at the peak of life, aren’t we?”
An Instagram reel reminding me to eat out on the weekends while living in New York, because I live in one of the best cities on the planet for food diversity, and to ignore that is to sin.
Vitamin D pills. I may be caught in a placebo effect here, but I ain’t gonna look too hard at the research to tell me otherwise.
The movie Resurrection by Bi Gan, the trippiest, dreamiest ode to cinema I’ve ever seen.
The dulcet tones and gentle Irish banter of Ye Vagabonds live.
The discovery of Coast to Coast in Scotland, which has become my animating physical goal this year and which I haven’t stopped thinking about.
A moment to remind a friend that I loved them.
And over the course of these things, I realized I no longer have much desire to project myself on the world. For the last 15 years I’ve seen life as a struggle, fundamentally; something to win or lose. I could compare my progress on the game board against the other players and find myself ahead or behind, both of which felt alienating. I read too much Nietzsche in college.
But call it 30, call it turning a new leaf, call it Vitamin D, I suddenly feel that, actually, life is to be enjoyed.
For a long time I’ve admired this Vonnegut quote, and now I feel it in my bones:
“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?
And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great-looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around.
And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
Anyway. For the remainder of my time I’d like to dance more. All that Nietzsche reading at least left me with the model of what to avoid: “And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall.”